Re: Imagesetter curves for silver prints

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FDanB@aol.com
Date: 07/21/02-10:15:41 AM Z


>Do you think a 225 line screen would be adequate quality?

A 225 linescreen on silver will give you a dot that you can see with your
eye. Lenswork has used a 425 or higher linescreen for their special
edition silver prints, which are very nice and display no dots under
normal viewing.

Note that Brooks Jensen has, with the most recent edition of Lenswork
Quarterly, switched to stochastic offset printing. A random dot
(stochastic) can produce more detail at lower resolutions, something I've
been saying for more years than I care to remember. It's nice to see that
Brooks agrees...finally. ;^)

One problem with stochastic negs has to do with Photoshop's 30,000 pixel
limit (in either image dimension). Taking advantage of your imagesetter's
3800 dpi output, you'd create a 1900 ppi bitmap. Doing the math, you'd be
limited to a bit less than 16 inches on the long dimension of your print.

Another point: when printing on silver, bitmaps can sometimes create
highlights with a faint "peppery" quality. That is, you might see some
evidence of dots in the lightest gray tones of the print. This usually
occurs with imagesetters running at 2400 dpi; with your 3800 dpi
imagesetter resolution, you'd probably get perfect stochastic negs and
prints. The best approach would be to run a test with both bitmaps and
linescreen negs and see which works best with your imagesetter.

I'll email (off list) two different silver curves to Terence so he can
get about his testing.

>and from Dave Fokos
>book, he recommends a 225 line screen

A 30 page PDF does not a book make.

Dan


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